{"id":30,"date":"2006-08-06T12:44:00","date_gmt":"2006-08-06T16:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/2006\/08\/dice-or-approximation-does-it-matter\/"},"modified":"2006-08-06T12:44:00","modified_gmt":"2006-08-06T16:44:00","slug":"dice-or-approximation-does-it-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/dice-or-approximation-does-it-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;dice&#8217; or  &#8216;approximation&#8217;, does it matter?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been meaning to do some new digging on Einstein&#8217;s enigmatic  complaint. In a recent program on Channel 13 (I think, but I can&#8217;t  locate it now) a recognized physicist portrayed Einstein as unable to  accept uncertainty in nature, and that view seems to be becoming one of  the prevalent understandings of the issue (see Wiki link below). On  the face of it, since Einstein was a founder of statistical physics, it  seems unlikely. &#8220;God doesn&#8217;t roll dice&#8221;, is about something else.  One of the things I finally found today to expose the deeper issue was  Niels Bohr&#8217;s long, polite, emphatic last-word on the subject (Bohr  1949). Bohr says that what Einstein objected to in QM was the  elimination of causality and continuity.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Yet, a certain difference in attitude and outlook remained, since, with  his mastery for coordinating apparently contrasting experience without  abandoning continuity and causality, Einstein was perhaps more reluctant  to renounce such ideals than someone for whom renunciation in this  respect appeared to be the only way open to proceed with the immediate  task.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><!--more-->Curiously, the violations of theory or nature expected by both sides in  this long debate don&#8217;t seem to have turned up in the many decades of  argument and experiment. QM works fine, so apparently the bizarre way  in which QM treats physical events as occurring without taking any time  or involving any process, i.e. abstractly following rules in the  complete absence of any means for doing so, doesn&#8217;t matter. Both  Einstein&#8217;s (impossible) and Bohr&#8217;s (necessary) views on the matter seem  to have been simply wrong.<\/p>\n<p>I guess my preference is the conservative approach. If it doesn&#8217;t  matter whether the disconnects of nature expressed by our best tool are  physical or informational, there&#8217;s no need to argue about it (i.e.  within the &#8216;shut up and calculate&#8217; school of thinking). The matter is  far from settled, I realize, since provocative proofs like those of  Bell&#8217;s hypothesis seem to support the idea that QM&#8217;s weirdness is  physically real. That real weirdness still appears to be entirely  contained, and to not violate causality and continuity anywhere other  that within QM, however.<\/p>\n<p>Where I think it may ultimately matter is in encouraging the idea  generally that nature functions as a set of abstract rules without  processes, rather than through incompletely understood physical  processes which our rules approximate. I think whether you interpret  nature is physical or informational on a macro scale probably matters a  lot. The two models at least appear functionally different and need to  be looked at.<\/p>\n<p>The central problem I see with interpreting physical events as a  function of rules is that those rules need to either refer to definable  things, or to have a player. I don&#8217;t think either of those is  demonstrable as a generality, and the opposite is much more the usual  appearance of the problem.<\/p>\n<p>Is there anywhere it would really matter, one way or another?<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;-  Niels Bohr 1949 Discussion with Einstein on epistemological problems in  atomic physics. <a href=\"http:\/\/minerva.tau.ac.il\/physics\/bsc\/3\/3144\/bohr.pdf\">http:\/\/minerva.tau.ac.il\/physics\/bsc\/3\/3144\/bohr.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;-  Wiki link &#8211; http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Albert_Einstein  &#8220;Einstein never rejected probabilistic techniques and thinking, in and  of themselves. Einstein himself was a great statistician, [19] using  statistical analysis in his works on Brownian motion and  photoelectricity and in papers published before 1905; Einstein had even  discovered Gibbs ensembles. According to the majority of physicists,  however, he believed that indeterminism constituted a criteria for  strong objection to a physical theory.&#8221;<\/p>\n<div><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/13795202-115488264650306650?l=alongshot.blogspot.com\" alt=\"\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been meaning to do some new digging on Einstein&#8217;s enigmatic complaint. In a recent program on Channel 13 (I think, but I can&#8217;t locate it now) a recognized physicist portrayed Einstein as unable to accept uncertainty in nature, and that view seems to be becoming one of the prevalent understandings of the issue (see &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/dice-or-approximation-does-it-matter\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8216;dice&#8217; or  &#8216;approximation&#8217;, does it matter?<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-along","category-scitheory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}